The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee accused the Bush administration Thursday of suppressing a classified intelligence report that paints a “grim” picture of the situation in Iraq.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) sent a letter to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden requesting the release of the report and charging that the agency was withholding the information out of political considerations, which she said was demoralizing to the agency’s workforce.
“I believe that the intelligence community has produced an in-depth intelligence review of Iraq, but that the material has been stamped ‘draft’ and will not be finalized” until after the November election, Harman said in the letter, which was released by her office. “The integrity of the organization you lead is at stake.”
…”I know that there is a substantially complete assessment on Iraq,” Harman said. “I understand it is grim. I understand many working inside the intelligence community are frustrated because the release of that document is being blocked.”
If you have a Republican brain you will write this off as another example of the CIA looking to swing an election to the Democrats. I have to admit that the bulk of the CIA seems to have been moderately more sympathetic to the Democrats since the summer of 2003. Maybe this is mainly coming from the Directorate of Intelligence and the Operations people are still largely right-wingers. Or maybe the treatment of Valerie Plame Wilson poisoned that well too. People that work in the Intelligence branch of the CIA are not a whole lot different from people that work at NASA or the National Institute of Health, or the EPA. They come up with hypotheses, run experiments to test their theories, and try to predict what the world will do under different scenarios. They are just as likely to be offended by the anti-science attitude of Bushism as any stem-cell researcher or global climate scientist.
The reality, however, is that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket, fast. Our intelligence assessment is that the war is making us less safe, that staying will not help, and that our military is being ground up. The analysts do their job and then discover that such news is not welcome and will not be disseminated prior to the election. Then they leak word of the report to the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat, and she makes an impotent request for access to the information.
The GOP cries about more leaking of classified information and more attempts by the CIA to effect the results of the elections. This cycle is getting old now. The same things are happening at the Pentagon. This administration is a failure. And more and more people are taking risks to get the truth to the American people. I hope it starts to sink in. I hope we are about to trounce the Republicans in these midterms and get a real mandate for change.
Our Army is trapped and soon will have no way out. This truly is a diaster of enormous proportions waiting to happen.
Of course the question that’s too obvious to ask in public is, why would the CIA want to help the Dems? No one this side of the megachurches, perhaps, has ever viewed them as liberals. Quite the contrary. Their record of supporting rightwing dictators with assassination, black propaganda, destabilization, and militias is beyond dispute. So is their major role in current torture and illegal detention.
So if we buy the thesis that they’re just trying to swing the election, the only reasonable explanation would have to be that they see the Bush regime as a deadly threat to the very existence of a Constitution-based America. When even the arsonists start warning you that your town is burning, it’s time to pay attention.
did they do this under relatively liberal administrations as well? (e.g. Carter and Clinton) I don’t know — I’m asking. I mean, it could be that the CIA has sort of been its own beast, independent of Presidential influence until Cheney started going over there to put his fingers into it.
At worst, I think perhaps the CIA would view any way to get back into the business they were designed for as a good thing, in which case the enemy of their enemy is their friend.
For one thing, I tried to separate the Intelligence people from the Operations people. The intelligence people have been at war with the hawks and neo-cons since Bush’s Team B was set up to refute their analysis of Soviet military capabilities.
But, the CIA is largely an arm of the Executive, and therefore, with some notable exceptions, does the executives bidding, and little else. Their job is to do what they are told and to cover for the President if they are found out. As such, the nature of their activities is very much dependent on the nature of the President. With Kissinger at the helm, they ran roughshod over Latin America. Bzrezinski got them started in Afghanistan. Bush pushed them into Central America. Clinton barely used them at all. They obviously did work on the Balkans and the former Soviet Socialist Republics, but Clinton had little interest in the CIA.
He almost never met with James Woolsey, for example.
This did not make Clinton very popular, since the CIA struggled to justify their budgets and earn merit badges for their operations.
The CIA operations directorate is well known for a right-wing anti-communist ass-kicking bent. They were initially enthusiastic about having a former Director’s son in office and after 9/11 they were as patriotic and vengeful as anyone.
It was the abuse of the Intelligence Directorate in the lead up to the Iraq war that started the real deterioration. Worries about torture started to cause strains in the Operations end of things.
But the failure to find WMD, the blame for that on the CIA, the outing of Plame, the creation of the Homeland Security Dept., and then the creation of the National Intelligence Agency, which took the reporting function (to the President) away from the DCI and the CIA analysts…
All of that has angered and demoralized the agency.
Add to this the failed war in Iraq, and continued blame and witchhunts…
They now see the future of both the nation and the agency as best served by Democrats.
Thanks for the analysis. I bought a copy of “The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence” when it came out in 1974, mostly because I was of an irreverent bent and wanted to buy a book that they had wanted to supress, but that’s about as close as I’ve ever gotten to learning anything about the CIA.
I have no reason they are more concerned about the future of the nation than Bush is. But it makes sense that they reached the breaking point on being scapegoated for all of Bush’s atrocities.